STEM Education Institute Tuesday Seminar
Fostering Inquiry and Critical Thinking through Technology.
Merle Bruno, School of Natural Science, Hampshire College
Beverly Woolf and Toby Dragon, Computer Science, University of Massachusetts
We describe several Web-based tutors that provide support for inquiry and problem-based learning and move students towards more active learning. The learning objective for students is to solve open-ended problems based on observations, formulating questions, and organizing data. Using computational tutors in large lecture-style classrooms, students are invited to solve cases, e.g., to diagnose a patient's disease or predict the location of the next earthquake. Teams of students ask their own questions, generate hypotheses and test their predictions in biology, geology and forestry. Students brainstorm predictions that might resolve some aspect of the problem and enter possible causes for the observed phenomena. They gather data to confirm or refute each hypothesis and resolve open questions. Tools help students organize their data so they can more readily see patterns in the level of support for different hypotheses, learn to assess evidence that impacts their hypotheses and search for data through a variety of outside sources, including the Web.
These tutors were evaluated with high school students and with undergraduates at three colleges. We discuss these results along with recent cognitive research on teaching and learning which formed the basis of the project. For more information, see http://ccbit.cs.umass.edu/Rashihome/.